was not far. He landed lightly, never in danger of tumbling backward over the rampart. He turned to the right and sped away.
Almost immediately he came upon the board bridge. At the far end stood a sentry, a matchlock in his hands. Startled, this man stared at George. The match lighted his face a little from underneath.
George dived for the space below the planks.
It was dark there. He took the word of Woodes Rogers that rubble was heaped high. For all he could see, he might have been pitching head-first into a chasm.
But here was rubble. It buffeted him. It caused him to cough. But it didn’t do much about breaking his fall. He felt that he was plummeting. His chest got tight.
Choking, gasping, spitting, he started to run.
He heard a gun, then another, and a little later he heard a third.
That a prisoner who had escaped from the persecutor of pirates would find welcome anywhere in Nassau went without saying. But George’s presence at a time like this might start a riot. The cry would go up: “Let’s take out the rest!” No more than a spark was needed.
He surmised that this fear of an explosion was the reason for the failure to chase him. Woodes Rogers would not risk sending search parties into Nassau. Indeed, he probably couldn’t have made them go there.
If the fort was taken Delicia Rogers would be taken too, and it did not call for much imagination to know what would happen to her. She was there instead of at Government House, he remembered, because of him.
So he altered his course, and made for the hills.
Doors were being opened, heads thrust forth, questions shouted. Nassau was no teeming metropolis. Many of the houses were mere shacks of thatch and braziletto. Others were tents. The only ones with floors and proper roofs were the rumshops, of which however there were many. The rumshops had been operating all night. Hundreds, womanless anyway, had stayed up to get in shape for the ceremony down by the beach. It isn’t every morning that you can see nine men strangled.
Figures loomed in the doorways, blurred by dawn. Men shouted at George, who shook his head and ran on. The truth is, he was at the end of his tether. At any moment he’d collapse. It was his wish to be far from everything—alone.
Soon he was behind the town, climbing, and nobody paid attention to him, their eyes being drawn, naturally, toward the fort.
George came to the corner of a sugar field. A less inviting spot for a nap it would have been hard to conceive, for the ground was bumpy and damp, the canes close together. George didn’t care. He plunged in, fought his way for a few yards, then fell, sobbing; a great empty roaring blackness, like that of the outer spaces, engulfed him.
The sound that George heard was not a keening, though it was high, as it was thin. A sea gull? He sat up, his head throbbing.
No, it was not a sea gull. It was not that . . . that . . querulous.
On hands and knees, groggy, George inched toward the sound.
The cane was thick. It was almost like poking his head out through a doorway when at last he came within sight of the man seated on the stone. This man was short, dumpy, a pudding. His lips protruded. His jowls waddled. His eyes were gooseberries. Across his lap lay a piece of canvas, and on this rested a cutlass. His left hand held the hilt, and with a stone in his right hand rhythmically he honed the edge. His movements were exact—yet he gazed toward the bay.
“Trouble?” asked George.
The man didn’t jump, he only turned his head; he put his hone away very carefully. The cutlass he simply held in his right hand.
“There’s trouble down there, yes,” he said, pointing.
Pain skittering through him like small bolts of lightning, George got to his feet, and straightened, and looked back toward Nassau.
He knew instantly that several hours had passed. The sun was well above the horizon, shining full and fierce.
The show was over. People already were leaving. He could see them drifting away, small and buglike from this distance.
The water was a blue not known elsewhere in this world. No catspaws ruffled it. The fronds of the palms were limp, like the black flag. There was not a wisp of breeze. The bodies of the men, too, hung motionless; they did not seem real.
“He can’t do that to us.” The pursy man, with a grunt, got to his feet. “I said he wouldn’t dare to, but he did. So I’m going away. What about you, stranger?”
“I . . . I’m going away too.”
The short fat man came around before George, and stood there looking up at him. He rubbered out his lips, twirking a mouth that, incongruously, was a Cupid’s bow. But the eyes were ice.
“Well, he did do it!”
“Yes,” said George.
He was enthralled by the sight of the crowd moving away. Gulls wheeled low over those bodies.
“But he did do it. And so I guess I’ll go and look for some goods that maybe are assigned to me.”
George chafed his temples.
“You mean,” he asked, “that you’re going on the account?”
“There’s other ways of putting it.”
“Whom?”
“Eh? Well, damn me, stranger, I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Vane?”
“Um-m. Charlie Vane has always been square in his dealing. Leastways as far as I’ve had anything to do with him.”
“And where do you find him now? How do you get there?”
The little fat man was glaring at him, but George still looked at the bodies.
It had happened. There had been no riot, no assault. Woodes Rogers ruled here, and his niece, that girl with the small dark head, still lived.
A great victory had been won, without huzzas.
Yet the threat remained. Nassau was a powder keg to which anybody might apply a match. Those ragged men down there, who, having looked their fill, were slowly moving away from the fort; they were sullen, unconvinced, quiet but not yet cowed.
“I’m not sure I like your face, stranger. But I’ve got a periagua over on the far shore that’s not big but it’s strong.”
“Vane?”
“Yes. Charles Vane. I know him well.”
George sighed, and sat down for a while.
“You know about this business?” the man asked suddenly.
“Enough.”
“Well, come along then. Look—” He gestured imperiously. “That’s
